TOUCHING THE VOID

OLIVIA SUDJIC

COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR 

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I’d expected to feel happy seeing my parents on their doorstep when, approaching Day 60 of my lockdown, I went to pick up a mask and latex gloves. But seeing them in person (albeit from a distance) for the first time in so long was a shock. I managed to act normal until the door closed, at which point I burst into tears. What do I mean by normal? The reality and behaviour I would’ve thought of as normal sixty days ago is entirely different now. Suddenly everything I’ve acclimatised to seemed crazy - not being able to touch them, not being able to go inside, not being able to look after each other how we would in any other crisis. It was easier when I’d been cocooned at home, not expecting to feel close because they were on the other side of London.

The jarring, physical shock of seeing them reminded me how poor, if necessary, a substitute technology is, as well as worry what our prolonged dependency on (and increased surveillance through) it will normalise in turn. It also made me wonder how healthy some of my pandemic coping strategies are. Many of my friends, however extroverted, now confide that seeing people on screen leaves them feeling more alone, and have begun to avoid Zoom ‘like the plague’ - an expression we now viscerally understand. ‘When you see someone in person you *are* the energy, whereas onscreen you have to *create* it’, one told me. I was relieved to hear him say this, and to read what Jeremy Bailenson - a professor at Stanford University who studies what happens when humans shift their interactions into cyberspace - explained in the Financial Times: ‘Most of us are not used to staring directly into enlarged faces on screen for hours on end. This can be exhausting, since it requires us to actively engage our brains, like being immersed in a new language.’ I’ve begun looking out for people who feel the same, finding it comforting when someone shares this alienation, more comforting than Zoom anyway. As Megan Nolan, self-isolating alone, wrote in the New Statesman: ‘So far, I have accepted these imperfect interactions as “better than nothing”, but I am beginning to seriously doubt that… Now I suspect that the inadequate approximation of something as profound and fundamentally necessary as human connection may ultimately be more depressing than its absence.’

There may be comforting ways to simulate normality with technology, like when Connell falls asleep while Marianne works at the other end of a Skype call in the TV adaptation of Normal People, but it is still a simulation. Even a soothing, silent presence (less exhausting) can’t make up for the lack of real, physical touch so many of us are experiencing 24-7, or when we try to ‘stay in touch’ virtually. I already knew about the relationship between physical contact and oxytocin, the bonding hormone released during sex and childbirth, but this week I learnt about the neurological phenomenon of ‘skin hunger’ - the biological need for human touch. As Sirin Kale writes in Wired: ‘It’s why babies in neonatal intensive care units are placed on their parent’s naked chests. It’s the reason that prisoners in solitary confinement often report craving human contact as ferociously as they desire their liberty.’ “When you touch the skin,” explains Tiffany Field at the University of Miami, “it stimulates pressure sensors under the skin that send messages to the vagus [a nerve in the brain.] As vagal activity increases, the nervous system slows down, heart rate and blood pressure decrease, and your brain waves show relaxation. Levels of stress hormones such as cortisol are also decreased.”